Transcript:
Hi, guys, welcome back to project two little backstory here. I stumbled across. Machinable waxes, wax filament specifically for casting a while back. And and if you watch me in my videos, you know? I do a lot of 3d printing to metal casting videos, and I thought it looked pretty cool. One of the issues with PLA is that it takes a long time to burn it out of your mold. And it also leaves a kind of a City residue that transfers to your castings. So I thought that you know. Hey, this would be perfect for the type of stuff that I do. I reached out over the machinable wax and asked if I could get a sample for a review. Wes over. There was kind enough to provide me. This one kilogram roll of their print to cast filament. If you seen my recent videos, you’ll notice that all of them have been this blue. Which is this print to cast filament and after printing out several things for about a month now. I figure it’s about time to do a review on it. So let’s get started, lets. Go over and take a look What the roll looks like and jump into it. Here’s what the filament looks like. This is a 1 kilogram spool, which is surprisingly a lot of filament, probably because it’s less dense and lighter than regular PLA. So there’s more on the spool because I’ve had lots and lots of prints, and as you can see, I’m maybe halfway through the spool. The filament is very waxed like, and I know it’s machinable wax and stuff like that, but I wasn’t actually expecting it to be as waxed like it is almost like a flexible filament, Not like plastic at all, and I’ll get into the you know the how it is as far as wax and the benefits of that later. Let’s get into the ugly first. The ugly is if you are new to 3d printing and or you do not have the time to fool with print settings. You just want things to print, and even if you want to cast them then? Pla is the way to go. These are just a sample of the failed prints that I had starting off now. Some of these are okay, and some of these aren’t now. This this is fine. This was just a test, it’s a cap. They go on a aluminum can like a beer can or something like that. I guess keep flies or something out of it. I don’t know it’s part of a Memorial. Day video that I was going to do. I may still do it anyways, and this came out. Good the Fidgets spinners. A couple of them came out, okay. I mean, eventually I got one, but you can see this. One bent a little bit The parts of the Caribbean coins. A couple of them came out. Okay, the Venger’s logo. This one starts separating off the bed and I’ll get into the specific issues that I had, but basically, my point is is if you do not want to fool around with front settings. This is not the filament for you if you do, and you don’t mind even 3d printing for a while then. I’m sure you can stumble your way through it and get a good print, Eventually like this one came out really great. Unfortunately, I tried melting the wax to smooth it out, which is one benefit of using wax is that you know you can heat it very slightly and smooth it out rather than using like an acetone or something like that, so let’s get into the issues that I found and how to correct them and how to get this filament to work correctly. All right, print setting. Let’s get into what Machinable box recommends. They provide a piece of papers and instructions on using this filament and I’ll just read off what they recommend Extrusion temperature, 140 C to 150 C fed temperature 65 C to 75 C. They know some have printed with cold bed. Shells to the three print speed is typically 20 to 70 millimeters a second and then they say prints best when layers have enough time to cool and they mentioned. You may be having a sacrificial filler or something like that, so let’s go through my print settings that I’ve had success list later. Height point one to point two add 1 point 1 millimeter print, and they came out just fine, no issues, shell thickness. I’m at two shells right now. You could do one shell. I think that would be too thin. I don’t think I’ve even tried one shell, but I found that the the thinner the shell. The better so one shell may actually even work better. Although I think it would end up cracking or layer separation, There’s just not enough material to hold it together. Bottom fill. This is important with getting it to stick to the bed thin. You want a thing so? I’ve said the same as my top Shell thickness at two two layers, basically go to thicknesses and fill. Disa tee is also very important in one of my biggest mistakes When I first started, I usually do a fill density of 20% depending on the model and that’s. The problem is is that there’s too much material inside the model and as it cools it contracts and pulls up the layers or pulls it up off the bed, so the least amount of fill density. You can have the better. If you can do a zero fill will do it. That’s the best way of doing it. Print speed. I’m currently at 40 with this cube. I’m printing. I’ll show you at the end of this in this video. I usually print around 15 millimeters per second. That’s what I found as work best, although I printed one of those Pirates of the Caribbean coins the other day at 60 millimeters per second and it printed out just fine, though that print is very low. It’s not a tall print so that may have had something to do with it. Turning temperature is probably one of the most important things and one of the biggest things. I played with, I’ve gone all the way. Down from 130 C up to 150 C 140 to 145 is where I find. I get the best amount of success success and with the lower temperatures I find I get layer separation with the higher temperatures poor print quality. It’s just smearing it all over the place. So, bed temperature, 70 degrees. I’ve gone from 7 -. Gosh, a lot higher! I think, and I found 72 75 degrees works best. I even tried where I only had the bed heated during the reversal layer and it’s important to have a heated bed. When you’re putting down that first layer. If you have a cool bed for without the first layer, it won’t stick a flat out won’t stick so also going back to printing temperature. I run the Skynet firmware on my AAA 8 and by default it will not let you sit. Set the printing temperature at that low. I think by default it is the minimum you can send. Print is 160 and there’s a command that you can put in. I had to research it to change that printing temperature minimum. And if you’re curious about that, leave a comment below, I can look it up and respond back to you. What the command was and how I changed it. It was like a month ago, so I don’t remember support type. Honestly, the support you got to play with. I’ve printed a couple models that need support and it’s like hit or miss on that. The problem is the filming so weak. It generally doesn’t work very good. Brem is absolutely mandatory. I found you have to have a brim and the bigger the brim. The better one of the biggest issues of this filament Is it feeling off a bit and I’ll get into the main issues in a second here after we go through all the settings slow. Whoa, was also an important one or your extrusion multiplier, and I have to give credit to Angus over at Matrix News because I was having a lot of issues with this, and he recommended with him specs and flexible filament kind of instructions or how to to increase the flow multiplier by a couple points. And I did that, and I had a lot more success once. I did that, so I’m at 102 I did some successful prints at 101 altogether. It was great if I didn’t say it. No retraction, no retraction. That was another maker schmooze thing, he said. No retraction on the advanced setting the initial layer. I think initial layer same thing multiplier 102 play with your cool your active cooling with your fan. I did a print where I forgot to put the hood around the nozzle and it printed just fine. I think it was one of the pirate Caribbean swings so again it was a really small entrance, but cooling that important. That’s the whole issue with this filament is cooling proven cooling. If you can’t get it the cool all at once, then you’re going to get layer separation, English and other issues, so then let’s go through the main three problems I had and what I did to solve them. One was bed effusion. And then when I first started, it was just peeling off the bed almost immediately and with like two or three layers, it would just kill feel better and I just have a regular heated bed with a blue tape on it and what I found is a large trim hairspray or some kind of glue, which machinable or wax does recommend and a heated first layer at the very least those three things so that solved my bed adhesion problems for the most part. I still get it every once in a while. Layer separation a lot of issues with layer separation, and I found that to solve that, or at least to help solve it. Let’s still get it even now occasionally is the hotter extrusion temperature, but not too hot, so the lower extrusion temperatures are like 130 135 I get lots of layer separation and it was just timing issues, so I increase the temperature up for 140 145 and and that helps solve it more flow by increasing your flow multiplier. It allows more of that filament that kind of shoot out and push against the previous layer and help bond and then slower prints. The print speed needs to be slow enough to allow that that layer to adhere to the previous layer 3 cooling. And I’ve said this before cooling is the biggest issue with this filament so play with your active cooling and see what you know what it affects. What if you print abs? And you have an enclosure? You’re probably going to have a a successful diss filming because you can. Wow, the whole model to cool uniformly. I don’t have an enclosure and I even thought about even building one, just because I was having issues, so I do recommend an enclosure and it probably will help, although I can’t say for sure, cuz I haven’t tried it. So here’s the cube that I printed during them while I was making this video and as you can probably see, there is a little hole at the very top right hand side of the cube where it didn’t fill completely, and you can’t see, but there’s a little bit of layer separation on this far right corner, and this is the bad of this filament Is that even when you get your your settings dialed in, you still will get small issues with the prints and I’ve played with it a lot. You will get good prints, but for no rhyme or reason, you’ll get some layer, separation or bed adhesion or little holes in the print, and that’s the bad now. Let’s get to the good, okay, so for the good. The good thing about this filament is that it’s easily manipulated after the print. You can smooth it out with heat. Although you have to be careful, you can carve it very easily. It’s not like PLA, where it’s so hard that you know you have to sand it for long periods of time, and it creates all this dust or or if you wanted to carve something into it, it’s going to be pretty difficult. The wax is very easily manipulated with a razor blade. You can carve away the portions of it and like. I said you can smooth it out and get rid of the layer lines with just a little bit of heat like that, somewhat like that that wasn’t so successful, but it works. The other thing is specifically for casting which if you’re not casting, then there’s really no reason to get this kind of filament, but if you’re casting, here’s a cast that I did of the pirate coin and you can see that burnout is super clean. It didn’t leave any residue behind, and that’s really nice. Also, it burns out a really low temperature and fairly quickly see with PLA. It takes hours upon hours at a really high temperature to burn out, and then it leaves this nice suit behind and that transfers on to your cast were in this filament it doesn’t, and it lowers the burnout time, depending on the model to only twenty minutes at that, So that’s a good thing about their filament. Now, another bad thing I would say is that it’s about sixty dollars a roll. The rules are pretty large, so you’ll get a lot of usage out of it, but considering you can get a roll of PLA. For what, $20 $30 you know, it’s almost twice the price, but if you are doing casting. I’d say it’s probably worth it because you’re going to spend a lot less fuel burning out the P, the wax filament than you are the PLA and you can carve it and manipulate it after the print. Well, guys. I hope you liked this review. I know it got a little long, but there was a lot to talk about. If you like this, go ahead and hit like, and if you want to see my other videos casting videos and so on and so forth hit, subscribe, appreciate it. Thanks for watching you.